It's all over town; have you read it?

If all goes well, I'll be talking to Rick Bragg soon.

Bragg is the author of "All Over but the Shoutin'," this year's United We Read book.

United We Read is the communitywide reading project that encourages everyone to read the same book and then get together to talk about it.

That's not so complicated, is it?

Several get-togethers already have been held, thanks to the able coordination of Julia Jorgensen, librarian at Central High School and Chief Ramrod of United We Read.

I like to give Julia as much credit as possible, because, quite frankly, without her enthusiasm and persistence, I don't think United We Read would ever have started, much less turned into such a rousing success.

My opportunity to talk to the author of this year's book comes Thursday night. The plan is to have Bragg on the telephone for a conversation. Ain't technology grand?

One question I intend to ask Bragg, if we don't get our wires crossed, is why he put "Shoutin'" in the title instead of "Shouting."

Does an apostrophe in place of a G make a book title Southern?

A lot of writers attempt to make written conversations match what we might hear in real life. One fellow I know carried that to extremes. He wound up winning a Nobel Prize for literature. His name was Faulkner, or something like that.

Faulkner didn't care much for capitalization either. For this, he gets a prize?

I've been an editor too long. Over the years I've worked with dozens of green, untrained reporters who thought journalism was better than working on an assembly line or selling insurance. To them, bad newspaper writing came naturally. My job was to drum whatever instinctive writing skills they had right out of them.

Without my help, I suppose, they would have been lousy journalists, but they might have a Pulitzer or Nobel prize on the table next to the TV remote by now.

The only thing I've read that Bragg has written is "All Over but the Shoutin'." It is a fine piece of writing. How fine? Let me explain it this way:

Almost every journalist I know fancies there is a book suitable for binding between hard covers waiting to erupt from his or her brain. Then you read something like Bragg's "All Over but the Shoutin'," and you say to yourself, "Dang! It's already been done."

Just about everyone who knows me also knows I work for a newspaper because of Lulu, the Jersey milk cow I grew up with on the farm on Killough Valley over yonder in the Ozarks. By the time I was in high school, I knew I didn't want a life scheduled by milking duties morning and night.

When I nagged the executive editor of the Kansas City Star into giving me a summer internship in 1965 -- it's a great story, and I'll tell it to you at the drop of a hat -- I don't know who was more surprised, the great John V. Colt or me.

Colt was surprised that I wouldn't abandon my pursuit of a job where my biggest opportunity for great writing would be if someone important died. Summer-intern obit writers don't get many big stories with Page 1 bylines.

I, on the other hand, was surprised by Colt's observation after we struck a deal and informed city editor Matt Goree that he had another intern to baby-sit: "You don't know what you're getting yourself into, young fellow," said the Star's executive editor after our impromptu lunch at his desk on Memorial Day in a nearly deserted newsroom. "Working for a daily newspaper means you have to fill it up with news every day, seven days a week. It's a lot like having a milk cow."

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian. He will lead a discussion of "All Over but the Shoutin'" at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Central High School library.